“The deepest technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” Mark Weiser, computer scientist.
Developments in the technosciences NBIC: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology, Cognitive science) have been progressively invading every space and life itself for several years, initially rather slowly, and in current times of emergency, with increasing speed. They are advancing less like a large monolith and more like an expanding fluid mass – a term dear to the Italian Rainbow left. By definition, it is prone to change while maintaining its democratic nature, which, to some extent, is also characterized by the assurances and demands that were meant to protect human being as we’ve known them thus far but have failed in their purpose.
If, in their work to destroy nature, humans have always considered themselves alien to the process of destruction, this has been impossible to do in the new artificial environment now called smart. The new paradigm taking shape does not have an inside or an outside but forms a single world: the individual is necessarily transformed, or rather, manipulated, and there is no going back. But just as life is not born but engineered in the schlop of synthetic biology labs, nature persists regardless of all the manipulation and degradation imposed on it, taking back unexpected spaces.
The current changes underway are unprecedented in their capacity for remodulation and in the manipulative power they use to transform reality. Things that are unprecedented cannot be interpreted using existing concepts and tools which don’t allow for an analysis of the subject and of means of transformation itself, its consequences and new characteristics.
It is important to have an in-depth understanding the transformations underway and to grasp their meaning before they fully manifest themselves. Everything that resists and doesn’t succumb to the process of transformation is destined to be forgotten and there is no way back. Just as a new industrial monoculture destroys biodiversity and gives us fruit made from terminator seeds that are recreated each time by the same system that makes us continually dependent both spiritually and materially, today’s digital monocultures want to colonise the world and sanitise every critical thought and struggle, eroding the very concept of freedom.
“We must choose: freedom or comfort. For a long time, the imagery of the gadget as being more efficient than humans no longer shocks citizens. Children born in front tvs and now with smartphones in their hands, no longer have a basis for comparison with other ways of living. It is entirely natural for them to talk to their “conversational agents” and their “virtual butlers” and they bow down to an artificial intelligence which they believe is at their service. It is a crime to have given young human beings these artificial devices that allow dominant models to spread at the speed of light, models that are constantly outsmarted, and work to humiliate whoever fails to conform because childhood and adolescence are the privileged terrain of mimetic rivalries […] Little humans don’t know what free time is, or the wanderings of the spirit and the sensitive discovery of the world. They are constantly excited and demeaned by the spiral of stimuli – images, sounds, fabricated desires – how can they learn to take charge of their lives and thought?“1.
From the concept of information to the smart city: the rise of cybernetic society
The smart city scattered with sensors and CCTV cameras is an open-air experiment in social engineering in which experts from large corporations like IBM, Google and Facebook manage all the data. The rationalisation of space, time and of people and their behaviour in which the ultimate objective is to automate humans. The cybernetic vision is fulfilled in its entirety: the measurement of every sphere of our lives and its analysis, management, and control through algorithms in which every dimension and process is digitalised, transformed into data to be analysed, worked, broken down, reassembled, cross-referenced and used to make predictions. A way to mould the world, society, and relations, a shape based on a very clear vision of the world and of living beings.
A cybernetic vision is being formed.
From Saint-Simon’s utopic vision of the development of cars as the route to freedom, to Condorcet’s vision of coordinated and planned management using the new tool of statistics; the orderly and optimal management of the world through the rationalising power of Comte’s technique; from urban planning based on the idea of calculating the distribution of space by enumerating the population and last but not least, Wiener’s cybernetic vision which presents society and every living being and their environment as a computer system – all had been impossible to fulfil in the past but today are made possible by the convergence of the tecnosciences, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of things.
Every space, event and behaviour, as well as living being, become computerised as we witness the “liquification of the physical world”, as stated in an IBM document.
The seemingly abstract concept of information takes on a harmful consistency and reveals its true project: to predict all present and future events and transform individuals into information and into automated beings that are hardwired for the machine-world. If we think back to Hollerith’s machine in 1888, with its punched holes that allowed for the codification of individual characteristics and for information to be quickly recorded and catalogued in real-time. The machine was used for the US Census and helped rationalise nazi extermination camps. Its inventor, who set up the company that later became IBM states: “The effective justification for the collection of large amounts of data lies in the ability to draw conclusions […] and to ensure that predictions of present and future events can be confidently made”.
In 1945 during the second world war, a military system was developed that could perform calculations on a probabilistic basis, gathering information from radars on the trajectory and at the speed of planes, integrating it with meteorological information to identify the best moment to launch missiles. The concept of “effective calculability” became crucial to make predictions and decisions in real-time; from then on, computing, through the development of cybernetics, was about calculating the best action to take.
With Wiener, cybernetics became the new Leibnizian mathesis universalis, a unified, biological and computational knowledge of biological systems or phenomena and structures that were social and of living beings. A quantification and unification of complex systems in which the subject itself is reduced to a sum of information and to a programme that can be deciphered and therefore modified like machines and can perhaps one day be directly managed by them.
“To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.”2. Norbert Wiener
The algorithmic accompaniment of existence
We are faced with technological developments that lead to a specific model of existence based on the constant presence of algorithms. Silicon Valley are not the only ones intent on developing Artificial Intelligence, as evident in their name which references silicon, a chemical semiconductor essential for the production of electronic components. They were also the first to understand and predict that existence would soon be characterised by algorithms in every sphere of existence. With the Internet of Things and developments in AI, all spheres of our existence become digitalised for the purposes of automating the whole of society as well as life itself. A key assumption here is the transhumanist principle of the inadequacy, inaccuracy and fallibility of humans as well as the judgements and decisions they make. The human component must make room for algorithmic management. It is neutralised like in cars with automatic pilot features, which aptly represent the ultimate objective of Artificial Intelligence: to steer us, risk free, towards a new world.
In general, these new processes are only analysed through the lens of profit and economics and in order to understand them in greater depth, we must go further. The consequences of these processes lie in the transformation of our relations, emotions, our intimacy and a changed relationship with ourselves, with others and with the world around us. Technological developments assign power the task of entirely managing life of all aspects of our existence, in every circumstance. Here, management will no longer be in the hands of the State but rather lie with whomever has the power of data. A cybernetic society can only be managed by technicians: an agricultural worker will no longer have the skills or the ability to autonomously manage his fields which, by now, will, be full of sensors and require the use of the company tablet. In this era, data become the main resource and those who own it also hold power over our lives.
In order to describe this process, the immaterial language of systems is used, in which abstraction cancels out the incarnate nature of data. The act of becoming data necessarily leads to being processed in the technological terminal. This is a feature that is required by a society, not of free individuals, but rather, of hard-working and unaware robots who, paradoxically, are voluntarily employed in the functioning and nourishment of the machine itself.
Individuals and experience become the very raw material that will be transformed into data through constant monitoring, including of single actions, gasps, imperceptible movements and looks, to the remotest of emotions.
The human body becomes a computational space in which steps, beats, sleep rhythms and the very depths of intimacy are probed and captured. Capter which means “sensor” in French reflects this quite well. Readily available data is not the only thing that gets extracted. Data is extracted and produced not simply to promote personalised commercial products but also for analysis using AI algorithms in order to predict, influence, modify, affect and shape behaviour. The result is not to shape our actions entirely, but to affect us through a more subtle form of conditioning that is sometimes imperceptible, but constant, pervasive and totalising. An integrated system in which we ourselves become the flow of data for the production of other data and serve to continually nourish and be nourished by Artificial Intelligence, allowing it to evolve and improve.
The aim of Skinner’s experiments on operant conditioning carried out on rats and pigeons, was to try and engineer behaviour: the modification of behaviour through a technological system that was to be extended to the whole of humanity. In 1947, he wrote:“It is not a matter of bringing the world into the laboratory, but of extending the practcies of an experimental science to the world at large”. In his book “Beyond freedom and Dignity” we read: “we need to make vast changes in human behaviour, and we cannot make them with the help of nothing more than physics or biology […] what we need is a technology of behaviour […] comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology.” Skinner’s experiments and his rat labyrinths had led to the rise of a technology of human behaviour which emerge in the objectives of Silicon Valley: “Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behaviour”.
Just as Amazon’s algorithms guide people in their shopping, the life of individuals in the times of the smart city is deprived of autonomy and freedom in a subtle way but, more importantly, as part of a process that is desired and proclaimed by individuals themselves. This tendency and profound influence in every day reality and in our lives is almost imperceptible and becomes the norm. Artificial Intelligence, far from being a form of intelligence – considering it is in no way comparable to the intelligence of a living being – is a methodology of rationality which will become almost impossible to avoid. Who better than an algorithm that knows all our habits will be able to guide us in our choices?
Unfortunately, the idea that systems will be able to analyse a situation and calculate the best action to take at any given moment, will take hold. Every manifestation of reality will be subject to processing through an algorithm. The new and gentle form of power taking shape does not have a façade of coercion or imposition, but rather, of free choice. It creates a context in which people will be constantly enveloped in algorithms that will meet their needs, desires, necessities and fears, guiding them along a programmed path.
The devices follow individuals in their daily lives with a whispered proximity in which machines take care of themselves.
A digital closeness without bumps and shocks, that only shows the individual – the mere user – the things he or she likes. Cybernetic society is the society of the positive in which everything must be levelled and transparent.
“Our greatest ambition is to transform the experience offered by Google to make it wonderfully simple, almost automatic in its understanding of what you want and in offering it to you instantly”. Larry Page, founder of Google, CEO of Alphabet.
In our interactions with devices, many actions are automatic, while others require us to briefly stop and think in order to make even the smallest decision. Amazon’s Dash Button allows people to make purchases and payments, keeping all mediation to a minimum, even if this means simply making a purchase order. The aim is precisely to eliminate every trace of thought and conscious decision-making. Actions are substituted with operations in which indulging and lingering are seen as a hindrance and only slow you down. As actions become operations, they become transparent and subject to measurement and control while decision-making is substituted by the individualised automation of the management of needs.
There are other effects alongside the material consequences of tight and alienating Amazon rhythms such as the increase in tumours and miscarriages among the factory workers producing Gallium arsenide for LEDs, the pollution of water tables and the environment as a result of toxic substances, the exploitation of populations in the global south for the extraction of rare minerals and the destruction of the environment and biodiversity.
The seemingly banal act of clicking on the Amazon Dash Button and all the applications that will take hold everywhere, will lead to the annihilation and automation of thought which will affect the way of living in the world via products that are automatically purchased when the smartphone tells us they are about to run out. This will extend to a way of living in the world.
When life is constantly subject to measurement
We will soon be immersed in an environment full of sensors which will analyse all our data and those produced by the devices in our surroundings. Our actions, words, and emotions will be interpreted to tell us, for example, what our health is like and what medication to take, if needed. In 2017, Google made ten thousand volunteers in its biotechnology sector wear sensors for four years to monitor their health and used indicators to predict the likelihood of disease. A predictive function that leads to a therapeutic solution. Some steps that appear merely incentivising, such as the discounts you get on insurance and health services in the UK and the US following the purchase of an Apple Watch, are integrated within a larger, complex and invisible architecture.
Apple’s HealthKit platform or Google Fit, wearable devices like the Apple Watch or simpler pedometer bracelets, all use their applications and advice to assign workouts and the use of a certainsubstance representing a process of continual self-measurement: individual performance is constantly monitored to ensure it can be optimised and boosted. A life that is constantly subject to measurement. The body becomes an object of continual performance and self-optimisation which is perfectly integrated into a neo-liberal logic in which we become our own entrepreneurs.
The processes of growth and strengthening which characterise exponential technologies become key tecno-ontological principles and it is through the technosciences that individuals can and must free themselves from their bodily condition to fulfil desires that can never definitively met: deeply transhumanist principles.
Google Glasses bring together computing, communication, photography, GPS technology, data collection, and audio and video recordings, into a device that can be worn as a pair of glasses and allows each person to send and share anything they are seeing online and in real-time.
The human eye has become a CCTV camera where to see is to surveil and where everyone both sees and can be seen.
As a forerunner to the other wearable devices, the decision to start with an object as familiar as glasses aimed at encourage people to wear devices. Google glasses did not take off and the company changed its strategy to make people in certain productive sectors wear them, using the justification that they increased productivity and efficiency. The aim is clear: to enter the workplace and create addiction, acceptance, normalisation, and then enter day to day life.
Similarly to our lives, the offline world in which we live is full or information that is online. Google Glasses would have closed this gap. It is not a coincidence that in 2013 Google and Facebook bought an Israel-based social-mapping start-up at the forefront of the generation of real-time information, based on people’s contribution. This gave Google a start-up of satellite images in real-time and allowed it to develop a new frontier of sensors and cameras through which individuals could map and navigate within closed spaces. Positioning systems beyond the smartphone allow individuals to be localised and constantly tracked, not only when they are connected to the internet but also in the real offline world.
The boundaries between online and offline become thinnerto the point where they mix and flow into a continual connection. We have gone beyond mere identification and an expert from the sector takes the following view: “New images can only describe what is on your desk. With a similar frequency we can get closer to what is called the “analysis of life patterns” and observe actions in terms of movement and not mere identifications”.
The Artificial Intelligence of emotions
The development of systems to support decision-making within companies began in the 90s. Their refinement was made possible by the growth in analytical and computational capacity and the evolution of algorithms and microprocessors to the point that IBM gave up on its computer assembly sector to work on strengthening its systems for decision-making support through what is defined as “cognitive” software for the analysis of Big Data. The software is based on deep learning and machine learning: the deep and automatic learning of Artificial Intelligence as so-called neural networks, which, put simply, work in layers to analyse and produce layers of information and is used, for example, by companies to select successful candidates, by banks for loan requests, by insurance companies and in the medical world.
In order to get insurance for your car or at work, you have to be classed as responsible: here’s where IBM came in with the Watson Personality Service to define suitable and reliable personality profiles.
The new frontier will be the Artificial Intelligence of emotions, the affective computing of projects like SEWA who develop Emotional interpretation software that searches for actions and imperceptible facial movements like the bat of an eyelid. Emotions open up an infinite hunting ground and a form of consumption, in which emotions are consumed as if they were goods and are always chasing after something new that never definitely arrives, disposable emotion-goods with short expiry dates for hedonistic atoms.
Emotions in the digital society pursue fleeting moments and serial events in a rhapsody of pleasures that is syncopated and disconnected to every form of projectuality. We are faced with emotional responses rather than emotions, deprived of all vitality and passion, which serve to maintain an emotional state of fear or anxiety only to then be transmitted and managed as required.
IBM’s Watson programme targets the health sector and aims to bring about a radical transformation in the way diagnoses and treatment are made and administered. The programme is seen as being able to make diagnoses such as skin cancer more accurately than a human doctor. This requires the comparison of a large amount of data and it comes as no surprise that the company that built the state-of-the-art technological pole in Milan on the old Expo site requested and obtained all of the health data from Italy’s Lombardy region.
This evolution in Artificial Intelligence is reflected in an increase in automation within a context where actions will be carried out by systems rather than humans and through analysis and solutions that relegate humans to mere agents. The system’s interface makes the decisions. The invisibility and hyper-complexity of the processes of analysis and decision-making neutralise the possibility of conscious action and lead responsibilities break down.
Surrounded by the words of systems
From the use of a keyboard in front of a screen, to a smartphone’s touchscreen, we come to the vocal interface that will open up a form of interrelation that is even more personalised and communication will soon become intimate in its nature. We are surrounded by the words of systems as interfaces no longer lie between us and systems, but rather, between us and an effigy of the human form. The physical and digital world overlap through the process of technology’s naturalisation which is made invisible in a world of communicating objects.
When describing the vocal assistant Alexa, Amazon’s vice-president states: “our aim is to create a kind of ecosystem for Alexa, that is open and neutral […] and to make it as pervasive as possible”. The vocal assistant’s predecessors had been in a development phase for 10 years as part of an Artificial Intelligence project in the United States. The project aimed to develop a computer that could engage in conversation and was designed to help the military on the field manage data and make predictions that were effective and would allow them to act autonomously.
The most profound invasion of the lives of human beings is underway thanks to the algorithms that accompany our daily lives with the promise of a less stressful and more functional existence. The fluid, warm, spontaneous and female voice that adapts to our humour and our personality naturalises the digital system which dissolves into a voice that acts as an intermediary between our lives and the world. A voice we confide in and with whom we can be intimate. In the words of Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana: “I know so much about you. I can help you in ways you don’t quite expect. I can see patterns that you can’t see”.
The luxuries of a given class or generation become the needs of the successive one as they are considered necessities and more importantly, have been made accessible to all. This process has been fundamental in the evolution of capitalism. Everyone will want a digital assistant and constant monitoring will become the reality. In this context, computers, sensors and all systems, will disappear in the background and the real world will become a single apparatus that is universally connected. “The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses […] so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic” Eric Schmit, former executive chairman of Alphabet.
The gentle form of power
Control itself is transformed: an influence exerted through a constant relationship – one that avoids excesses and the distress and intrusive nature of an Orwellian world. At the same time, it is careful not to be too absent in order to avoid breaking ties and dependency. We are no longer faced with a simple question of surveillance or of our much-loved privacy being violated, but rather, of our behaviour being influenced and ensuring that, through a technical structure, good organisation can prevail and things can function as intended – both at the microscopic and macroscopic level – or rather, according to programmed paths.
Surveillance and control, as we understand them, lead to the detention, exclusion or isolation of all individuals who, in some way, deviate from the established order or violate and rebel against the rules. The new automated management of behaviour, while maintaining this repressive structure, has universalised the principle of internalising all these norms. So much so that, similarly to the electric fencing surrounding certain fields, all those in the herd who inadvertently or voluntarily dare to go beyond the fence get electrocuted. But nothing more than this happens as the structure of the matrix alone is enough to contain any from of divergence.
The new gentle power does not need to use duress, its reassurances are sufficient. In order to become widespread, all it needs is to meet our demands and to know every aspect of our lives. The new form of gentle power creeps into our lives, our perceptions and our relationship with our bodies, with others and with the world around us. Invisibility and pervasiveness lead to its normalisation. People will be drawn to a world in which everything is structured according to their needs, with prediction and certainty and the unforeseen element is eliminated with automated regularity. The certainty produced by machines is the solution to fear and social uncertainty.
The idea that you can exercises more power than that which states you must: no constrictions, only inner needs asserted by individuals themselves. We know very well how self-exploitation and self-entrepreneurship are more effective because they are couched in terms of freedom and self-determination. The new form of power is more subtle and does not take hold of individuals directly but builds a system around them that can act autonomously. This leads individuals to reproduce an element of dominion within themselves, internalising, desiring and claiming it as their freedom. In this sense, freedom and subjugation coincide.
Bentham’s panopticon continuously watched prisoners but it didn’t have access to the deepest parts of an individual. In contrast, whoever will set our algorithmic future will not only have access to our internal life but also influence and establish meaning itself – initially, of the world and subsequently, of human beings themselves.
In Bentham’s panopticon, individuals were aware of their imprisonment whereas people in the digital panopticon live under the illusion of freedom. They freely and actively take part in their own monitoring and surveillance and in that of others: “Today yet another paradigm shift is taking place. The digital panopticon is not a disciplinary biopolitical society, but a society of psychopolitical transparency”3.
In digital society the voluntary display of oneself leads to our systematic dispossession, a process of vetrinization. It is not simply about putting yourself on display, which implies you can keep things hidden, but about total transparency. Everything is exposed. A narcissistic exhibition of the selfie generation.
Today, surveillance does not happen like an attack that denies or restricts freedoms. Freedom is exploited until it becomes control and they both become equivalent. So much so that free choice is the freedom to choose between the only options offered by power.
The coercive model is not entirely functional to a form of power that wants to invade every sphere of our existence and to mould individuals to the point where it becomes invisible and turns into a free choice wherever a behaviour, way of life, relation and way of interpreting and understanding the world are perceived as being free choices, “engineers of the human soul”4.
The efficiency of this form of power does not come from banning and depriving but from making concessions and satisfying. The production of docile and dependent bodies. People’s desires are not repressed but channelled into a specific vision of the world. The panopticon was based on the deception of permanent control and at its centre was the perspective of the central tower’s vision and the omnipotence of the dystopian gaze in which prisoners did not know whether they were being watched or not at a given moment. In the digital panopticon the gaze lacks perspective and the distinction between the centre and the margins fades. Surveillance is widespread, permanent and, unlike Bentham’s panopticon, it has a memory.
Gentle power dissolves until it becomes imperceptible in its absence, in habit, in normality. Power that operates through habit is more effective and long-lasting than when it acts through oppression. This worldview invades and becomes a part of the plot of daily life, along with our perceptions and our bodies. It becomes normalised and is then freed by daily life itself which becomes its bearer. Gentle power acts and develops along a “horizon of meaning”,5only to consolidate itself effectively into a single perspective and prevent the emergence of something different. This process “sets itself apart from the violence that acts nakedly, precisely because it has been stripped of meaning”6.
Metamorphosis of the State
Within the global framework where the struggle for technological leadership is taking place, the State and its large oligopolies are forced to mediate and find a common strategy. Although there are frictions, they never truly emerge. An agreement is always made and technological innovation unites everyone behind a chorus of unanimous consent. This also applies to the appropriation of raw materials required for the development of Artificial Intelligence: the generation of data on individual consumption, behaviour, on states of health, on the functioning of new urban systems and on the transformation of geographic territories, on epidemiological dynamics and the climate…The state has fully adopted the principle that everything is information – a concept very dear to Silicon Valley and its followers – or perhaps it is the principle itself that has completely changed the meaning of power.
As individuals themselves become the raw material for digital development, the appropriation of data becomes the primary mechanism of power, turning into an essential need that sets the course of all techno-scientific politics and going well beyond the market’s simple control over individuals.
Single States are increasingly becoming digital colonies in the hands of international finance, international organisations and large agricultural-bionanotechnological-pharmaceutical corporations and of Big data. They become platforms that link people and private infrastructure to allow cybernetic society to function more fluidly.
Everything that had previously been part of the traditional administrative sphere, the public sector, has now moved towards an economic sphere that is characterised by a series of novel attributes. In this sense, the digital transformation of administrations should be seen alongside the development of the platform State and the move towards a new status for people.Individuals who until recently had been tied down by rights and duties within a common structure become users with the right to benefit from the best offers, just like consumers. This is in line with a spirit that comes from a commercial logic and prior to that, from having adapted to the logic of satisfaction.
Recently, politics has been reduced to concept of satisfying people. This is a crucial step in their transformation into docile and obedient patients. Within the new infrastructure, States are only called upon to devise mechanisms for the systematic extraction of data to be used in production in the traditional sense of the term, and more importantly, in scientific research, where the theories on how to build new societies is formed.
The new phenomenon that already exists is based on constant algorithmic monitoring and is not encompassed in the idea of the State exercising control. The state might be called upon to regulate data extraction processes, although not for much longer. It cannot however, under any circumstances, afford to halt the development of the digital world, as Artificial Intelligence in its collective development promises to organise every single thing, to generate wellbeing and offer people anything they have the right to expect, in this sense, achieving the perfect synthesis between neoliberal and leftist aspirations. The automation of one step activates the following step and the automation of the entire process instils a chain reaction in all the processes it is linked to.
This logic cannot be broken because the system will try and go around it. The end result might be the automation of medical cures, of news and information or of purchased goods and commerce. In the end, we will be forced to automate ourselves just to avoid getting in the way of the system.
What is democracy today if not the search for new techniques that can act on people, inviting everyone to take part in the accepted general order of things. The State will convince us that machines will only do what the system asks and this is exactly what IBM said during their large-scale roll out of the company’s powerful computers.
In China there is already a system in place that acts as a laboratory for the automatic management of behaviour: the social credit system, Alibaba’s Sesame Credit. This is aimed at almost everyone – with the exception of people with criminal records – and is based on the scientific assessment of behaviour, providing you with an initial score that decreases following different daily actions you undertake. People with higher scores get benefits like being able to rent a car without a security deposit or having greater access to the healthcare. Those who end up on the “non-compliance list” can be banned from buying a plane ticket, building a house and enrolling their children in private school.
Sesame Credit uses an algorithm to analyse things like the purchases you make, your level of education and the quality of your friends. People can only guess how to improve their individual scores and get rid of friends with low scores. In only two years, Sesame Credit had recruited 400 million people, taking over every aspect of their lives. For the company’s CEO, the rating system “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go”.
In an interview, the Social Sciences Academy researcher who invented the social credit system states: “It’s the best way to manage society, it allows us to control financial risks and reinstate moral education […] We need peace and stability and for everyone to live well, only then can we talk about rights. It’s an excellent technological method. France should adopt our system to deal with social unrest, with social credit they wouldn’t have had the Gilet Jaunes, they would have been identified from the start and there would not have been unrest.”
There are powers and forces at play that go beyond and exist regardless of the power and influence of States: research hubs like Silicon Valley, or large agricultural-bionanotechnological-pharmaceutical corporations, Big data or arms and bodies like the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), or foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation or Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Their objective is to fulfil a world vision and clear ideology that takes the form of specific techno-scientific developments and projects. States are subordinate and functional to these processes. The Rockefeller Foundation or Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also play a role in the prediction-development-management of different pandemics. They will exploit the new coronavirus, COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), to carry out their digital identity project ID2020. Think of the development of the 5G network: a State that is subject to criticism and social pressures can heed caution – as in the case of GMOs and nanotechnologies – but it cannot stop these developments. It can only try and slow them down and present them in a different, more sustainable, controlled and safe light, like the smart city project in Barcelona which is cherished by environmentalists and feminists. These are key developments for the advancement of the tecno-scientific system that go beyond power and the role of single States.
5G: the network for Artificial Intelligence
The 5G network is about much more than just transmitting data at faster speeds. As well as increased speed, it will allow for more simultaneous connections and for the transmission of data in real-time with virtually no delay.With a ping, the time interval between the moment in which the signal is sent and the moment in which the response is made available – the response time of a system – is not delayed by more than a few milliseconds.
These characteristics – more simultaneous connections with no delay – and the ability to sustain a large quantity of gigabytes and terabytes, are of key importance to Artificial Intelligence, quantum calculations, augmented reality, biometrics, automation and to the transmission of data between machines: machine to machine (M2M). These things are also strictly interdependent: the development of one is necessary for the advancement of the others.
If we think about the research that originated within the military and was subsequently applied to the civilian sphere – like the research on radars that later led to microwave ovens – the 5G network and related developments like Artificial Intelligence can be implemented in both civilian and military spheres simultaneously. This not only transforms the weapons of war – with new arms like automatic military vehicles and drones that can fight wars – but also the way wars are waged. The digitalisation of the battlefield theorised by Darpa (the American military research body) is based on the constant exchange of information and the coordinated and immediate decision-making that follows.
The fact that Google’s AI AlphaGo defeated all other players at the game Go – which is much more complex than chess – attracted a lot of interest among the military’s high command who saw in it the demonstration of “strategic thinking” and therefore the potential to develop plans and make decisions in wartime contexts.
The 5G network is the breakthrough that allows the smart city to be developed in full and the Internet of things to emerge definitively, the internet of cybernetic humanity: an enormous information network in which everything – humans, other animals, natural environments, urban adornments, infrastructure, services – will be connected and communicate within an integrated system.
The idea to develop an invisible technology that is transparent and pervasive and must be able to
engage people at different points in their day through objects used in day-to-day life, dates back to research conducted in the 80s at the Xerox research centre in Palo Alto, Xerox PARC.
The term ubiquitous computing coined by PARC researcher Mark Weiser represented the idea of a new type of human-machine interaction which developed into the well-known Internet of things.
In 2002, IBM’s director described the intelligent planet that had been conceived in his labs: “the world’s digital and physical infrastructure will converge. We are putting computing power at the service of things that we would not previously have recognised as computers. In fact, almost everything – whether they be people, objects, a process or service, a public or private organisation, large or small – can become responsive to the digital reality and form part of a network”.
Passive sensors will become active and real-time data analysis will inform real-time actions – like a car engine being turned off if you haven’t paid your insurance. Real-time not only refers toa technological structure but also represents an anthropological transformation in which there is no room for uncertainty. Everything, including something unexpected or an error, must be predicted or picked up on in the precise moment it manifests itself. This is total dominion on the living but also on the course of events.
“However it is a form of control that is more poignant and that not only feeds on recent or old archives but also on the state of reality in the moment in which it is formed […] You might call it “the constant transparency of the existence of the present.””7.
The Internet of things brings surveillance society to fruition: the things around us watch us and listen to us. We are also surveilled by the things we use on a daily basis which constantly transmit information on things that do or don’t happen. Our entire surroundings actively work to register and record our lives in full.
Without the constant production of data, the development of Artificial Intelligence itself would not be possible: data on individual consumption, behaviour and states of health, on the functioning of new urban systems, on geographical territories, on the climate – data on everything that’s classed as information.
Google does not extract data merely to sell advertising space. It gets used to develop its Artificial Intelligence projects. Google’s self-driving autopilot cars were not developed following technological innovations but thanks to the large amounts of data extracted to improve Artificial Intelligence using neural networks. Similarly, Facebook’s relative advantage in biometric recognition systems lies in the 350 million photos uploaded onto the site by users every day.
Artificial Intelligence becomes necessary when the world’s ability to generate information surpasses the ability to process and analyse it. Its development will be crucial for the analysis of Big data, the development of self-operated vehicles and for the automation of industry and services. For this to happen, a 5G network is required. A new convergence that signals an epochal transition in which the 5G network is at the heart of this cybernetic revolution.
The new colonialism
“It is maps that create empires”in lands that have yet to be conquered. Street View aims to make everything in the world representable, reachable and indexable via Google. “Contribute to Street View, “Create your own 360° tour thanks to the products compatible with Street View” is what the project’s presentation says, a project which is also based on people’s participation and perfectly in line with the new participatory approach. Street View is not only made up of streets but also of information on how they are travelled by people.
As colonialism conquered new lands, they had to be mapped. Today, mapping is extended to human beings themselves. In 2020, Facebook will have 700 million new smartphones in Africa and aims to become its new platform just like in other places in the world that are on the digital margins. This will give them access to data on future users and therefore consumers. FreeBasic is a digitalization app for less developed countries that provides free access to the internet and to a range of services among which the only free ones are those developed by Facebook. Through its philanthropic façade, the app gathers key information such as health data and data that benefits women. The aim is to gain control of personal data, shape consumer choices and create new needs.
The control of 5G technologies, the global production of microchips, the extraction of lithium, cobalt, coltan and rare-earth elements required for microelectronics, have a crucial role to play in the global geopolitical chess match and will be the next conflict zones in the fight to secure global leadership. In 2018, the Trump administration had blocked the takeover of the number one microchip producer Qualcomm by a Singapore-based company. This was a strategic choice driven by the knowledge that being a global leader in microchip production was essential to lead in the 5G and AI sectors. The clash between the United States and the Chinese company Huawei should be understood in this context. China has become a competitor in the development of the 5G network, AI and automation. The Chinese corporation and online marketplace Alibaba has search engines and payment and trading platforms that allow it to manage a logistic chain that delivers 60 thousand parcels a day – ten times more than Amazon in the United States. Alibaba’s online payment platform has the capacity to manage 120 thousand transactions per second – a third of what US platforms can handle.
In the new race for Africa, the 4G networks already built by Huawei put the company in a position of greater power compared to the United States. To conquer new territory, telecommunications and digitalization infrastructure are required. Just as railways used to represent the advancement into new territory in the past, today, this is built on the back of telecommunications that are 5G-ready. An indicative example is the agreement backed by the Chinese government and signed by the start-up Cloud Walk Technology and the Zimbabwean government. The start-up develops facial recognition systems and the agreement includes the development of a mass surveillance system that is similar to the Chinese system. Zimbabwe will get new infrastructure while Cloud Walk Tecnology and China will receive huge amounts of data to improve the ability of facial recognition systems to recognise individuals across ethnic groups – one of the main problems in Artificial Intelligence training.
The engineering and automation of humans
There are certain technological developments that represent something that goes beyond their mere function and which cannot solely be reduced to their development in itself – think of the mobile phone which is not only a tool but represents the dominant transformations and paradigms of a specific historical and social moment.
The self-driven car that integrates sensors, data analysis and AI systems in a smart city made possible by the 5G network should be seen in this light. A self-driven car cannot exist in isolation and must be integrated in an urban environment and with the various sensors within it.
People use their cars to shop, eat, go to work, speak on the phone. Increasingly, they will interact with their car’s vocal assistant and sensors that will monitor their emotional states, set the right temperature and advise on how best to act. They will be perfectly attuned to the paradigm in which our lives are gently managed. Google is not interested in the car itself but in the behavioural data it provides, not in the map itself but in the data returns from movements and map searches.
Google is increasingly investing in automated vehicles, domotics and wearable objects and Facebook is developing drones and augmented reality. It is no coincidence that IBM sold its entire computer production sector in 2005 to develop automated management systems. What emerges from the actions of digital companies is that their aim is not build cars but to be inside them so they can constantly surround us. Through its creation of Alphabet in 20158, Google revealed that digital companies want to extend into all areas of our existence and be ever-present in our lives.
Self-driving cars not only manage journey times but also the time spent travelling, as they extract and work passenger data to recommend suitable restaurants or shops. By providing the answers, the system decides what the right solution is to address a given problem or need in that moment, even when no needs have been expressed. Google’s app Driving Mode which makes recommendations for destinations and travel times before users know where they want to go. We are destined to become passengers in own our lives, just like in the self-driven car. Not only will the management of data become automated, the aim is to automate human beings themselves. It is about taking human beings out of decision-making processes and directing their behaviour in a model of rationalised cybernetics in which humans are the error and the unforeseen and where exceptions and limits will not be tolerated. A transhumanist ideology embodied by companies like Google and IBM that will be fulfilled in the creation of a machine-world.
As stated by the transhumanist Nick Bostrom: “As materials become increasingly malleable, the idea of a fixed species becomes problematic and reproduction loses its meaning. […] The more powerful and accessible our technologies get, the more we will be able to define ourselves…define the aims.Consequently, human groups will distinguish themselves based on the values that guide their choice of how to use these new powers to shape their morphology and their destiny.”
The technocracy of Silicon Valley boasts that it is working for the benefit of future generations, but what is meant by future generations? Those who are not generated, but produced in labs between microscopic slides, test tube cells and cultures, through the genetic modification of embryos, ectogenesis and cloning, without bodies every meeting, without a mother or a father.
We are facing an ontological transformation – in an antropotechnical dimension – as the very concept of humanity is redefined. An anthropological transformation – defined as the radical transformation of new generations – is underway, in which human beings are uprooted, eroded and with a sterilization of their capacity for awareness and resistance.
Humanity will be dispossessed of its ability to engage with reality, “we live in a world where things are retreating from consciousness”9. Without a conscience, it will no longer be possible to develop the sense of awareness and responsibility required to act in a society that produces opinions that leave the existent unchanged and don’t have consequences. Camus wrote that there is no such thing as a rebellion that isn’t centred on the idea of an offended human nature, one which is mortified and deserves redemption.
Resisting the megamachine
We find ourselves in an epochal moment marked by profound and irreversible transformation. Now is the time to realise this and fight against it.
The 5G network, while enormous, is only the means by which a world called the Internet of things – made up of communicating objects, and more recently, communicating bodies – can travel at high speeds.
In the world as we’ve known it up until now, it was impossible to foresee the intention and direction of these developments, even when they were confined to innocent labs or used to enslave animals on industrial farms.
It took a long time to bring technological processes to fruition, in particular, to bring them into the social sphere – with the accompanying social upheaval – and to pave the way for their social acceptance through so-called public participation which lies at the heart of the rigged democratic game. In recent years, the accelerating speed of technological progress has meant that we’ve seen the needs of the technological world before their actual development: wars, climate disruption and finally, the health dangers that stem from the creation of permanent pandemics, all speed up these processes and justify what has been under development for years. At their centre lies widespread Artificial Intelligence – not as a means but as an end and as a type of nonlife.
The process of economic re-ordering in which States are currently engaged is being used to reconfigure a new world made up of digital dictatorship and “health terror” and is treated as if it were the only state of things to ever have existed. Fear, hatred and attention are channelled towards something immaterial that cannot be fully understood. It is the system itself that provided us with the tools to understand this new reality through its propaganda and experts, but soon, these things will become concrete with vaccines and microchips on a mass scale. In this narrative, a crucial step has been missed, which until recently, still had meaning: opposing the present state of things. Why would there be opposition when we are all united through the same fears and hope for the invisible enemy that threatens everyone’s health?
This signals the importance of finding meaning once again and of attributing meaning to things in a way that encompasses different values, as stated by Ted Kaczynski in “Hit where it hurts“:“It isabsolutelyessentialtoattackthesystemnotintermsofitsowntechnologically-oriented values,butintermsofvaluesthatareinconsistentwiththevaluesofthesystem.Aslongasyou attackthesystemintermsofitsownvalues,youdonothitthesystemwhereithurts,andyou allowthesystemtodeflateprotestbygivingway,bybackingoff”.
Reattributing meaning must begin with the recognition that research labs concretely aim to engineer humans and reduce us to automatons, much like the robotic devices that move parcels in the logistical sector. The key developments which the system cannot afford to lose in or retreat from must also be understood in their concrete form: the 5G network, Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnologies, synthetic biology, genetic engineering and artificial reproduction.
By dealing with these questions only in part, we are limiting ourselves to focusing on the latest harmful effects or on certain aspects and we risk losing sight of the whole, while making action less incisive. For example, in the case of GMOs in agriculture, the system is open to dialogue, whereas the genetic engineering of humans is not. Yet, it is self-explanatory that when control over our bodies, their processes, and reproduction is lost, all ethical barriers will come down and the system will be able to engineer the living in its totality. Analysis and action should immediately be directed at places where it hurts, without being afraid to touch on questions that are seen to be untouchable or of being criticised for being an isolated, disconnected, and, in short, premature minority.
If the transformations overwhelming us are unprecedented and cannot be interpreted using existing concepts and tools, the same applies to resistance. It will have to adapt to the present and find new strategies for intervention that must be efficient and aim for the focal points of the new digital world. The passion for struggle, which they’d like to weaken or domesticate and bring into a virtual or symbolic sphere, must be discovered. Time is running out, like an electronic tag, without respite. The changes that will take place in future months and years will be permanent and there will be no going back. So, for those who love life the only thing left to do is to bring it to fruition and be driven by a way of feeling that still makes sense, towards the freedom that develops in the midst of struggle.
May 2020
Resistenze al nanomondo
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org
1 Pièces et Main d’Ouvre, Manifeste des Chimpanzés du futur contre le transhumanisme, Service compris, 2017.
2 Wiener Norbert, The Human Use of Humanity Beings, Houghton Mifflin H., 1954.
3 Han Byung-Chu, Im Schwarm. Ansichten des Digitalen, MSB, 2013, trad. it., Nello sciame. Visioni del digitale, Nottetempo, 2015.
4 “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks. […] The engineers of the human soul must forge the new Soviet man”. Joseph Stalin, Speech at home of Maxim Gorky, 26 October 1932
5Han Byung-Chul, Was ist Mach?, Ditzingen, 2005, trd. it., Che cosa è il potere?, Nottetempo, 2019.
6 Ibid.
7 Sadin Eric, La silicolonisation du monde, L’èchapeé, 2016, trad. it., La siliconizzazione del mondo, Einaudi, 2018.
8 Alongside the search engine, Alphabet: an operating system (Android), an advertising service (AdWord), an online video platform (You Tube), map services (Google Maps e Street View), healthcare companies (Calico), an education service (Google for Education), domotic products and products tied to the internet (Nest Lab), infrastructural networks (Google Fiber), robotics (Boston Robotics), urban planning (Sidewalk Labs), Artificial Intelligence (Google Brain e Google DeepMind), a lab for moon-based projects (Google X), self-driving cars, a private equity fund (CapitalG) and an investment company (GV) to support start-ups.
9 Graham Harman, Heidegger on Object and Things, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, The Mit Press, 2005.
Published in 325 magazine: https://325.nostate.net/, https://325.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/325-12-net.pdf
